This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,788 for Wednesday, the 8th of February 2023.
Today's show is entitled, Night of Court 2, Torch.
It is hosted by Dave Morris, and is about 7 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is I have owned one of these for many years, and find it very useful.
Hello, Hacker Public Radio, this is Dave Morris.
I've got a short talk today, which I've put together in a bit of a hurry, because we're
again so low on shows, so just as a hint to everybody, if you have any ideas for shows
and you have the capability of making something relatively quickly, then your contributions
will be much, much appreciated.
Anyway, again I'm with the subject, I'm talking about a torch, or as other parts of the
world called them flashlight, and it's subject that came up during the recording of a
community news in May 2022, I'm not very quick.
I've got an example of this particular device, which is called a night core, night core seems
to be a fairly productive brand, so there are many different torches available, but this
one is called the tube, and it has had its since 2016, and it's been fantastic.
It's got lots of reviews all over the place, but I thought I'd just give you a quick overview
and point you at some of the longer reviews if you're interested.
Version I have is the night core tube version 1, which I don't think is available anymore,
this is not on Amazon, there's version 2, which is about the same price, and should
be just as good.
There's a photo of the little torch against a ruler on the imperial side, so it's a little bit
over two inches long.
I bought this on Amazon, and I have to sing big Clive's YouTube channel where he did a
video about it, and it was under 10 pounds at that point, and I haven't tried the version
2, but I will maybe do so at some point in time.
It's a small plastic body torch with fittings for a key ring, I've not been keen on the idea
of putting on a key ring because things on key rings tend to get bashed by the keys,
well I have a huge lot of keys, but they are in a pocket and tend to get rattled about a lot,
so I keep this one in my shirt pocket, there's a little rubber like, some substance that feels
like rubber on the top of it, when I say the top I mean the flat side, it's actually quite narrow
device, it's got enough width that you can hold it easily, and it's got a button in the middle
of the flat sides, which is just down from the LED that does the business.
It has a micro USB port on the edge, which is also covered by one of these rubbery
caps, which you can easily move to one side and plug a USB cable in. When it's charging,
there's a blue LED inside the body of the torch, which let's you know what's happening,
and turns off when charging it's complete, nothing very exciting there. There's a whole
I'm surprised how many functions are in these things, it shouldn't be really, so it'll be a
micro controller or something in there, which is doing it, but a single press turns the low
light level on and off, that's just enough to see your way around in a dark and area, dark
and room, it doesn't carry very far, but it's fine if you're not wanting to turn the lights on
in your house at night and you're moving around for whatever reason. If you do a double press,
it turns on the permanent high level mode, which is quite a lot more powerful, and it's really
really quite good that you can see a lot with that in the dark. If you do a single press and hold
for more than one second, you get temporary high mode, and then if you press and hold when in
low mode, it increases in brightness in steps, and you press and hold for more than five seconds
when it's in high mode, and it'll lock the torch against accidental button pressures and presses,
the light links to show that it's locked, and then just press and hold to return to normal.
I'd played with this, but I don't use it because in a short pocket it doesn't get a lot of
bumps and bashers, so it tends not to suffer from being switched on accidentally. So I don't
use this torch a huge amount, it's not a thing that I'm trotting around the outside with very much,
but the fact is in my pocket means I have a source of quite bright light when I need one. The
lower light level, as I said before, is good for moving around in the dark or in a gloomy place,
but the brighter level I tend to use to read labels on jars, bottles, and other containers.
I think it's probably my age and my eyes that are letting me down here,
because I cannot deal with labels on things where they're quite small to start with,
writing is very small, and they use weird coloring, like a dull orange lettering on a purple
background, I've written down here, another sort of maroon, orange on maroon, so similar.
If I illuminate it with this bright thing, I can read it, but otherwise, no chance. I could hold it
under a light, I guess, but the lighting in my house is not bright enough to have for me to see it.
So the night court is my savior, as I say in the notes, and I didn't have this sort of thing.
The other thing does pass it to my kids and they can read that, but it's not, I won't be very
popular if I keep doing that. I don't charge it very often because it's not getting held
a lot of use, but it's easy to do the phone charger. I have several micro USB cables around and
lots of these charging plugs that I used over the years for phones and MP3 players and whatever,
so it's well able to to cope with that. So yeah, so my conclusion is that this is great little
device. I have other torches for when I need stronger, more broadly illuminating the light source,
but I wouldn't be carrying these around there, they're bulky things. I wouldn't be in my pocket
all the times, what I mean. The night court is small and compact enough, like, and keep it on
it all times. And if I lost this one or it died, I'm pretty sure I'd get another similar nature.
And this brand I find is good and reliable and quite well made. So there's a bunch of links in the
notes, which if you're interested, you can go and look at the quite a lot of big clive links
and a very detailed review of the device. So if it's of interest, you're I hope you find them
useful. Okay then, that's it. Bye-bye.
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